Organizations that fulfil orders for goods or articles to be delivered to purchasers, such as distribution warehouses and E-commerce and catalogue retailers, generally rely to a significant degree on manually intensive processes, or partially automated processes, to fulfil the orders. A typical order fulfilment workflow in such an organization involves receiving an on-line order from a customer, picking the purchased articles from an inventory of articles, sorting the purchased articles into containers on an order-by-order basis, assembling literature or other dispensable products to accompany the purchased articles, and physically associating the dispensable products with the purchased articles for packaging and delivery to the purchaser.
In a typical e-commerce situation, for example where product is ordered over the Internet, and if multiple items are ordered by the customer, the retailer will attempt to ship all items at one time. Taking an apparel retailer as an example, each order is picked at a distribution centre along with orders for thousands of purchasers for subsequent sorting. If 100 purchasers order the same article, all get picked and put in a bin. A person then inducts each item onto a sorter which travels around the distribution centre and separates the articles by purchaser order. This process is automated, however at each sort location the system will collect several orders of multiple items.
In addition to any documents created for internal purposes, literature or other dispensable items may be delivered to the purchaser with the articles purchased. Such literature may include (by way of example and without limitation) specification sheets, warranty information, product promotions or coupons relating to products or services and on-demand packing slip, MSDS sheets and other on demand documents. Other dispensable items may include (by way of example and without limitation) CDs, promotional gifts, product samples and the like, and any combination thereof.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,184,178 issued Feb. 27, 2007 to Panunto et al., which is incorporated herein by reference, teaches a product and document fulfilment system that fully or partially automates a order fulfilment merging a discrete purchased article with documents specific to that article, for subsequent packaging and labelling. This system works well for filling orders consisting of a single article. However, filling multiple orders that involve multiple articles presents additional challenges.
One challenge is the manner in which literature or other dispensable items, which may be specific to the articles purchased, or specific to the purchaser based on the types of articles purchased or other information previously acquired about the purchaser, are merged with the purchased articles before packing or bagging the order for delivery. This is conventionally a manual process. However, organizations that fulfill orders for purchased articles are heavily reliant on throughput in order to be competitive and profitable. As with any retail operation or organization which packages and ships different products to a large number of purchasers, a highly reliable order fulfilment system is of paramount importance. However, it is also of great importance that order fulfilment be provided at a reasonable cost so as to permit the delivery of the products to the ultimate purchasers at a reasonable price.
Another challenge is the sorting of the bins which contain several orders of multiple items per order and coordinating the collateral literature that is also selective by order based on demographic requirements of the e-tailer. Sorting each order, printing on demand documents and collecting other respective literature is a very time consuming manual process in a conventional distribution centre.
It would accordingly be advantageous to automate the merging of purchased articles with dispensable items, such as product literature or others, in batches.